Related papers: Optimal Auctions vs. Anonymous Pricing
We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
We consider the unit-demand envy-free pricing problem, which is a unit-demand auction where each bidder receives an item that maximizes his utility, and the goal is to maximize the auctioneer's profit. This problem is NP-hard and unlikely…
Developing efficient sequential bidding strategies for repeated auctions is an important practical challenge in various marketing tasks. In this setting, the bidding agent obtains information, on both the value of the item at sale and the…
We consider the bilateral trade problem, in which two agents trade a single indivisible item. It is known that the only dominant-strategy truthful mechanism is the fixed-price mechanism: given commonly known distributions of the buyer's…
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…
Throttling is a popular method of budget management for online ad auctions in which the platform modulates the participation probability of an advertiser in order to smoothly spend her budget across many auctions. In this work, we…
We establish nonparametric identification of auction models with continuous and nonseparable unobserved heterogeneity using three consecutive order statistics of bids. We then propose sieve maximum likelihood estimators for the joint…
We consider portfolio selection under nonparametric $\alpha$-maxmin ambiguity in the neighbourhood of a reference distribution. We show strict concavity of the portfolio problem under ambiguity aversion. Implied demand functions are…
In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
We provide a new, much simplified and straightforward proof to a result of Pavlov [2011] regarding the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling two goods with uniformly i.i.d. valuations over intervals $[c,c+1]$, to an additive buyer. This…
We present an extensive analysis of the key problem of learning optimal reserve prices for generalized second price auctions. We describe two algorithms for this task: one based on density estimation, and a novel algorithm benefiting from…
We consider a monopoly seller who optimally auctions a single object to a single potential buyer, with a known distribution of valuations. We show that a tight lower bound on the seller's expected revenue is $1/e$ times the geometric…
We consider the sale of a single item to multiple buyers by a revenue-maximizing seller. Recent work of Akbarpour and Li formalizes \emph{credibility} as an auction desideratum, and prove that the only optimal, credible, strategyproof…
Recurring auctions are ubiquitous for selling durable assets like artworks and homes, with follow-up auctions held for unsold items. We investigate such auctions theoretically and empirically. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that…
We study the identification and estimation of first-price auction models where bidders have ambiguity about the valuation distribution and their preferences are represented by maxmin expected utility. When entry is exogenous, the…
We study the pricing query complexity of revenue maximization for a single buyer whose private valuation is drawn from an unknown distribution. In this setting, the seller must learn the optimal monopoly price by posting prices and…